WD's Guide to Fall TV

Find out which new shows are worth checking out

As we watched the pilots for the 2009–2010 TV season, a stunning realization gradually dawned on us: They were, actually, pretty good. In the best of years, maybe two or three keepers emerge from the fall lot; this time around, as many as 10 might ultimately prove to have staying power. Better still, none of them are procedural crime dramas that tidily wrap up their business within 44 minutes. Here, our top picks for your leisure-hour consumption.

Glee This Election-meets-Fame take on the travails of a high school glee club isn't for everyone, given its unabashed political incorrectness and mostly unsympathetic slate of characters. That said, for viewers who dig that sort of thing, Glee is the most barbed, joyous hour of television in quite some time. There's more talent in this singing, hoofing cast than there is on entire other networks. Audio and video downloads of the show's musical interludes are moving like hotcakes on iTunes, so that might be the place to start for those unwilling to invest a full hour.

Modern Family Family sitcoms tend to be unwatchably contrived: By the end of the half-hour, everybody makes up, hugs and learns something about tolerance, loyalty or generosity. Modern Family, on the other hand, traffics in sight gags and to-the-camera monologues, all the while tracking three distinct and non-sitcom-like TV families. We have no idea how this made it past the network honchos without having been bland-ified, but we're sure glad it did.

Community There's nothing inherently funny about a low-thinking community college. But populate it with a bunch of selfish, self-unaware characters—including a glib lawyer played by The Soup host Joel McHale and a Chevy Chase–like bumbler played by Chevy Chase—and you've got a setting rife with comic potential. Danny Pudi's Abed, a pop-culture-obsessed dweeb who speaks faster than most people think, is the season's breakout performer.

Bored to Death Co-created by writer Jonathan Ames, this HBO comedy-noir chronicles the adventures in unlicensed private detective-hood of, uh, a writer named Jonathan Ames. So yeah, it'll be a bit too meta for some viewers. That said, the top-notch cast—Jason Schwartzman, Ted Danson and Zach Galifianakis, with guest spots from the likes of Kristen Wiig and Parker Posey—plays up and plays off the deliberately obtuse premise. In the end, the show comes across more whimsically deadpan than weird.

The Good Wife Yes, there's a certain ripped-from-the-headlines feel to The Good Wife, in which the wife of a scandal-embroiled politician has to rebuild her life in the wake of her husband's betrayal. What elevates this show above movie-of-the-week territory is that they've given the titular wife brains, wit and a drama-friendly career (as a lawyer, natch); they also had the good sense to tap television vet Julianna Margulies to portray her. In any event, the show plays way, way better than a straight reading of "The Eliot Spitzer Story" ever could.

The Vampire Diaries Lord knows pop culture doesn't need another book, show, movie or Internet short in which sexy vampires do sexy-vampire things, but The Vampire Diaries scores points with its moodiness and sporadic bursts of deadpan humor. Two episodes in, the brother pairing of Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder (Boone from Lost) already boasts more chemistry than any other brother or buddy duo on television. Don't hold your waning enthusiasm for all things Twilight against it.

Melrose Place Forget the not-quite-nutzo-enough first few episodes—they've announced plans to bring Heather Locklear back, which means insanity is sure to follow. The show's central cast of 20-somethings play along gamely enough, but it's the original Melrose Place alumni that lend the remake its bite. Prettified psychosis is more difficult to depict than you'd think.

Trauma NBC isn't touting Trauma as "our best attempt to replace ER," but that's precisely what it is. Once you get past the pilot's calamity-per-minute bombast, it depicts the lives of its trauma-unit minions with uncharacteristic understatement. Given that Trauma was created by actor-turned-producer Peter Berg, who brought us the still-wonderful Friday Night Lights, there's reason to be optimistic.

White Collar Picking up where the engagingly low-key Burn Notice and Psych left off, White Collar presents yet another oddly matched crime-solving duo, this one consisting of a con man and a fed. No, the setup and character interplay don't exactly break new creative ground, especially when the show teases an attraction between the slick con and the fed's wife. But White Collar is airy, casual and—get this—entertaining. Ambition is overrated.

Flash Forward If there's any show that'll keep Lost buffs occupied until the series returns for its final season in January, it's Flash Forward—and that has less to do with the presence of two Lost mainstays, Dominic Monaghan and Sonya Walger, than it does with the mind-bending plot pivot. See, every person on earth blacks out for precisely two minutes and 17 seconds and during that time they, like, glimpse their predestined futures or something. Whatever. Sci-fi and serial drama buffs will like it plenty.

The Jay Leno Show There's nothing super-smart or ambitious about The Jay Leno Show, which does little more than transport the host's gentle Tonight Show shtick to an earlier hour. But it's worth checking out to see if the late-night format translates well to primetime. One note of caution: If the show succeeds, expect to see the 10 p.m. hour overrun by cheaper-to-produce talk shows. In other words, enjoy your police procedurals while they're still around.

V Remember that circa-1983 miniseries in which human-on-the-surface reptiles invaded from space and consumed our rodents in a single gulp? It's been updated for the aughts à la Battlestar Galactica, but without the politico-socio-cultural allegories that occasionally weighed that reinvention down. Given the cast, which includes Lost player Elizabeth Mitchell and post-pubescent Party of Five star Scott Wolf, this one should ultimately transcend its been-done-before premise.

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